CHRIST CRUCIFIED IN EGYPT.

First and with almost terrifying force came the certain realization that the central key doctrine of Christianity--the death and resurrection of the Son of God to redeem humanity--could not possibly connote the death of the body, the physical demise, of any man-savior, but could bear true meaning only in reference to the soul-death of the Sons of God collectively in their incarnation in all men. At one stroke of sound understanding the historical foundations of apostolic Christianity and its Gospels were swept from under the entire structure. The "death" of the crucified One was seen to be his incarceration in mortal body, not his bloody torture and decease on a cross of wood. That which "died" to rise again was the Christ-soul; and catastrophe had ensued in Christian counsels and Christian history because this "death" of imperishable soul was misconceived to be the physical death of a one-man embodiment of the Christ-spirit.

Along with that came the astounding assurance that the Christ's resurrection could have nothing to do with the rising of a corpse and its bursting the bars of a rock tomb on a Judean hillside on any Easter morn. This was now seen to be allegorism depicting the soul's eventual bursting the gates of this hell of imprisonment in the flesh and winging its way in the glory of celestial light back to its empyrean home, the "sting of death" and the "victory of the grave" having been overcome at the last trump.

Hard on the heels of these overpowering realizations came a startling corroboration of the restored interpretation, one that has strangely survived Christian manhandling of the Scriptural texts, in the eleventh chapter of Revelation. If, as five or six Church Councils have decreed in utmost solemnity, every word of the Bible is God's infallible truth, then at least one verse of the Holy Book negates the whole story of the four Gospels, taken historically. The apocalyptic writer (who, say many discerning scholars, could not have been the disciple John!) is speaking of the "two witnesses," previously called "the two olive trees," but taken by theology to be two hierarchical powers; and in the preceding verse he says that the "dragon" shall rise up and slay them. Then in verse eight he makes the statement that puts all historical Christianity on the stand for searching cross examination: "And their dead bodies shall lie in the street of the city which is spiritually called Sodom and Egypt, where also our Lord was crucified."

Only the flash of light dimmed for eighteen centuries and reillumined as Massey's "Egypt" was being perused, provided a dialectical basis for the salvation of Christianity in its proper essence and message from the devastating implications of that remarkable eighth verse. What! The Lord Christ not crucified in Jerusalem, but in a city spiritually named Sodom and Egypt! And Egypt not even the name of a geographical earthly city, but of a land and nation! (And even that meaning disqualified by our present knowledge that the name "Egypt" in both Old and New Testaments is an allegorical designation for earth itself, the "underworld" into which souls descend for incarnate life!) Also there is the damaging consideration that geographically and historically Sodom and Egypt were not one and the same place, a fact which makes it necessary to assign one crucifixion to two different places, and neither of them the place claimed for the event in the Gospel stories. If the statement in this eighth verse is in any sense true, then it refutes the whole of the Gospel accounts of a physical crucifixion of the man Jesus in Jerusalem. And with characteristic subterfuge the ecclesiastical system of Christianity has evaded the issue presented by the conflict between this verse and the Gospels.

From this precarious dilemma Christian theology can be saved only by the resources provided by the very philosophies which the Church, both early and late, has pronounced heretical. The now readily discernible clue is hidden in the word "spiritually," the adverb used to describe the manner of the naming of the city of the crucifixion. If this locality was "spiritually," (another translation says "mystically") called by several names, it could not have been a geographical town, but must have been a "spiritual" city! One of St. Augustine's two major books, which is indeed one of the foundation pillars of the Christian faith, is entitled The City of God; and this, it is to be noted, is no geographical municipality, but clearly a kingdom of spiritual consciousness. So, then, there can be no dispute over the figurative meaning of verse eight, which clearly states that the principle of Christly spirituality is crucified in this lower world, or city of mortal consciousness, and thus only spiritually, not physically, crucified. It was the crucifixion of soul in a physical body, but not the crucifixion of a physical body. And that difference represents the vast abyss between sane understanding of Biblical meaning and ghastly misunderstanding in centuries of Christian theology. The death and crucifixion was that of divine soul on the cross of the flesh, and in no sense that of fleshly body on a cross of wood. The latter, however, was used symbolically and dramatically to typify the former, and ignorance mistook it for the actuality in a historical sense. It was soul, not body, that met crucifixion and "death." The mortal body, named variously Sodom and Egypt, is itself the cross, on whose four arms the Christ-soul is crucified.

In the view here brought to light with clarifying force it can be seen at one sweep how through the blunder of mistaking the Christ-death for the demise of a bodily personality, instead of the "death" of divine soul when incarnated in all bodies, and entifying the cross as a piece of wood instead of the bodily life and limitations, Christianity has lost the purport of its entire original message for intelligence, has indeed exactly reversed the axis pole of all its organic wholeness and so has almost come to teach the very opposite of what its literature meant to convey. By taking "death" to refer to the decease of physical body (and that of one man alone), and therefore being forced to take the phrase "after death" as pointing to the post-mortem spiritual existence in heaven worlds, the meaning-message of Christianity has been shunted clear out of the world in and for which its theology was to have cogent and helpful application, and has landed over in a world of disembodied existence, where its intent was not directly to have reference at any time! By this error in cryptological interpretation Christianity has missed the world for the behoof and uplift of which it was intended, and shot its meaning and reference over into a supernal world where it had no direct or immediate application.

IN THE UNDERWORLD.

Then came the further glow of illumination from the new-found meaning of the name of that mysterious world into which all mythological heroes find their way, a world so baffling to savants and scholars through all the many centuries. This elusive region of the myths is the so-called "underworld," or "nether earth." The ancient Egyptian books named it Amenta; in the Hebrew Scriptures it is Sheol; in the Greek system it is Hades; and in Christian theology it is the Hell of the creeds. Scholars have been at sea for ages in their effort to localize this lower region of the soul's existence, which it entered at or after "death." Their addiction to the common meaning of the word "death" as the demise of the body kept them searching everlastingly for the locale of this dark realm of the "dead" in every possible area in which the spirits, or "shades" of the dead might be thought to take residence. The more general conclusion among many wild surmises was that it was one of the "lower hells" of the spirit world, some gloomier level of the "astral plane" of the Theosophists. Some were content to let its location rest with the six feet of grave space beneath the sod. Budge, the great Egyptologist, was finally forced to confess that it was neither in heaven nor on earth, but suspended somewhere between the two in an indeterminate region! By some again it was put down in actual subterranean caverns. All the while the scholars, wedded to the idea that it must be a place inhabited by souls after (physical) death, and assuming it could not be rational to think that we were denizens of it at this very time, refused to look for it in the one place where it lay before their eyes at every moment of life,--on earth itself. They could not ever catch the conception that "under" was used in reference to the primal point of life's departure in creation, the heaven world; and so they kept on seeking for it under this world. With their failure properly to locate Amenta, together with their equal blindness in failing to sense the cryptic meaning of "death" in the Scriptures, they have missed every true connotation of ancient sacred revelation of wisdom and knowledge, and contorted the message of Holy Writ into a ribald hodge-podge of error and idiocy.

In the lucid moment of that flash of understanding it was seen that every meaning in every theological or Scriptural presentment immediately falls into its proper niche in the one grand edifice of religious truth. So clear was this realization that it was obvious that the architectural lineaments of that grand temple never could be beheld in all their harmony and beauty without the clarifying beams of these two lost principia of rationalization. But when, in their light, the structure was viewed in all its integrity, the organic unity of the whole and the interrelation of every part, were equally vivid discernments of transcendent intellectual magnificence. The "lost meaning of death" and the proper location of the "underworld" of mythology were the two crucial keys needed to unlock the ancient casket of "divine theology," and their recovery was certain to transform religion henceforth from its character of a dementia-breeding superstition into its original force for racial salvation. These two emendations would inaugurate a new culture in a new world.

In the ancient day--if Plato's time may be called ancient--the great body of esoteric teaching, conveying to initiated minds these cryptic connotations of basic terms and concepts, was confined to the narrow cycle of the few who could read and attend lectures in the schools of the Mystery Brotherhoods. There was no possibility, hence no thought, of attempting its popularization among the masses. It was necessarily esoteric, the possession of the few literati. Little wonder, therefore, that when the rabid promulgators of Christianity determined to spread their new gospel among the multitude, they ignored and later despised the secret knowledge of the esoteric cultists. This observation is in itself an item that religious scholarship has overlooked. Christianity shortly took the road of appeal to the sympathies, the predilections, the emotions and the ignorance of the downtrodden masses, and thereby closed every door of connection between its popular advertisement of personal salvation and true intellectual understanding and knowledge. Paul, from every indication, endeavored to reestablish the connection and to reintroduce the Gnosis and the Greek esoteric wisdom; whereupon immediately the wing of Petrine, apostolic and "primitive" Christianity vociferously denounced and opposed his efforts. It is a "miracle" of some magnitude indeed that his fifteen Epistles were kept in the ecclesiastical canon at all. As every honest writer has observed, his exposition of "the wisdom hidden in a mystery" has practically nothing whatever to do with the faith and movement assumedly set in motion by Jesus and the Judean disciples and apostles in Palestine.

But now we have reached an age in the development of mankind when it may be possible to disseminate the occult truths to the general populace. Every attempt hitherto has resulted in the direct distortion and falsification of the cryptic presentation, with mostly calamitous historical repercussion. Now, however, the general level of intelligence is perhaps high enough for the release of buried truth with fair hope of no catastrophic consequences.

And it is clear that St. Paul uses the term "death" in the connotation which this brochure assigns to it, as its true meaning in the Scriptures of antiquity. Excerpts from his Epistles will confirm that statement.

It was overwhelmingly thrilling to reflect that the lost secrets of the world's antique literature had found solution again in this modern age, and with involvements and consequences for history henceforth that staggered the mind to anticipate. It is difficult to describe the satisfaction that sprang from the knowledge that the "underworld" of mythology is just this good earth, and that the "dead" of the Scriptures are our own souls flitting about here amid the murky shadows of the images of truth and reality. Broken was the haunting dread of those bogies which a fearful theology had reified in the imagination of sensitive childhood; gone was the fear of a future ordeal of punishment for earthly misdeeds in a fiery hell of torment. For this life is the Hades, Sheol and Amenta, and whatever it held of pain and horror was being met now and found not by any means horrific. And there was the positive knowledge, mighty in its comfort and cheer, that if this is the "death" of the soul, it is one that looks ever toward the dawn of a wondrous day of awakening and a final resurrection to a life of ineffable glory. A thousand phantoms of traditional orthodox religious "teaching" were instantaneously dissolved in the sunshine of the intelligence that the Scriptural tomb of death is nothing more fearsome than the physical bodies we wear on earth, and that our bursting the bars of that tomb is nothing more insuperable than the mastery of a truly spiritual science. It was a prodigious gain of peace and serenity when all the unintelligible and irrational collation of theological asseverations that held the mind in a world of doubt and confusion was lucidly resolved into the actualities of conscious evolution in the present life. It was nothing less than a joyous release from morbid unhappiness to know at last that all the spectral experiences promised by current theology for a darkly unknown future were being lived through, and not too unhappily, in the life now running. In a word, the new light removed at one flash of its beams the sting of death.

THE TOMB OF THE BODY.

At about the same time there came one of the numberless correlations of meaning that continued to be revealed through the study of comparative philology, one indeed that supplied overwhelming corroboration to the discernment made through the reading of Massey's exegetics. Two English words of four letters each and differing in only one of them were seen to be alike because they esoterically connote the same thing. These two revealing words were "tomb" and "womb." If soul went to its "death" when it entered the body of a child, then that body must be actually its tomb, grave, sarcophagus, sepulcher and mummy case. But since also in that very tomb of "death" it was destined in the course of its cycle to have its rebirth or resurrection from "death," then also this body became in time its "womb" of new life. That vehicle which became its tomb of death, was also the conceiving mother-womb of its new birth!

And this startling correlation from two English words was more than corroborated by a similar, but even stronger kinship of structure that united two Greek words, namely soma, body, and sema, tomb. There is no escaping the deduction that the Greek Sages saw the body as the tomb, as well as the womb of the soul.

Along with the sweeping current of endless new enlightenments that came with every fresh sally of thought from the gate of the new premises there flashed the discernment of the esoteric meaning of the descent into and exodus from "Egypt." Here was another reorientation and clarification of a whole segment of both Old and New Testament cryptography. The geographical Egypt, lying south and west of Judea, fitted the allegorical direction in which souls from above traveled on their way down to earth and body. They went "west," then "south." If one will examine the charted direction of Abraham's journeying from the empyrean of heavenly fire, Ur, to "Egypt," it will be found that he went first west, then south.

The Egyptians called the "dead" the "Westerners," those who had "gone west" to "death." A few scholars have been astute enough to see that "Egypt" in the Scriptures can not be taken as the geographical country of the Nile Valley. To do so turns many texts referring to it into asinine irrelevance. The "Egypt" of the Bible is the allegorical designation for this same "underworld," Hades, Sheol, Amenta, lying "south" (that is below in the sense of inferior gradations of life's power) of the heavenly kingdoms. We are now in "Egypt," "the land of bondage,"--"that slave pen," as the Moffatt translation of the Bible phrases it. Our diviner spirits are in humble servitude under the power of the elements of the flesh and of the world. They came here to do a work which could not be done in heaven. For this world alone provides the fulcrum of matter against which spirit can base and brace itself to exert its potential might. We are, as souls, being crucified in this world. And so it is no miscarriage of truth when the Revelation verse says that Christ was crucified in "Egypt."

Furthermore, in Old Testament allegorism, "Egypt" could only be escaped by crossing the "Red Sea." As elaborated elsewhere, the liquid nature of the human body--composed of seven-eighths water--and that red in color, really solves the mystery of the "Red Sea." The soul must pass through its ordeals of living experience in the red fluid of the body to make its final exodus from the "flesh pots of Egypt." At any rate corrected modern translations of the Scriptures have taken the Red Sea out of the text! In Moffatt's translation it has become, and correctly, the "Reed Sea." Literalists must stand dumbfounded at this disappearance of their geographical body of water from the story. Yet, oddly enough, that very phrase, when taken in another and its obviously true sense, brings it back to them as the (physical) body composed mainly as water. Literally enough they must know that they are making their evolutionary way from "Egypt" to "Canaan" through a red body of water--the human blood!

In Greek mythology the god of the underworld was Pluto. He seized Proserpina, the divine soul, daughter of Ceres, cosmic intellect, and dragged her down from the light of day in the upper realms into his darksome kingdom and forced her to marry him. The myth becomes alight with meaning when it is known that the "underworld" is this earth. For the soul is impelled by divine necessity to descend here below and marry the kingly powers that rule it.

In the meaning-glyphs of ancient Egypt Osiris was the Pluto, king of the "dead." Says Massey: "The buried Osiris represented the god in matter." But King Spirit goes into a torpor when first he plunges into this underworld. Matter stupefies his powers and faculties. So Osiris was overcome with stupor and had to be awakened and regenerated by his own son, represented as the Father's own nature, a while "dead," but revived again. So the souls that had entered this nether earth were termed "sleepers in their coffins," "prisoners in their cells," or "spirits in prison." Even the Christian Gospels retain a fringe of this symbolism in their brief statement that during the three days Jesus lay in the tomb of death between his crucifixion and his resurrection he descended into hell and there preached to the "spirits in prison." In the 142nd Psalm the soul prays that God will bring it up "out of prison." Isaiah (42) says that the people are "snared in holes and they are hid in prison houses." And the same chapter states that the Lord will come into this "underworld" "to open blind eyes, to bring out the prisoners from the prison, and them that sit in darkness out of the prison house."

Matching this in the old Egyptian books we find the soul beseeching its deity: "Imprison not my soul; keep not in custody my shade; let the path be open to my soul; let it not be made captive by those who imprison the shades of the dead." And again it pleads: "Let not Osiris enter into the dungeon of the captives."

Massey clearly sets forth the nature of this "underground" Amenta in his description, so closely matching Christian phrases: "The wilderness of the nether earth, being a land of graves, where the dead awaited the coming of Horus . . . to wake them in their coffins and lead them from this land of darkness to the land of day." (Let it be remembered here that the real title of the Egyptian Book of the Dead is "The Coming Forth Into the Day.") How closely this harmonizes with the proclamation of the Christ himself, when he says in the Gospels: "Verily, verily I say unto you, the hour is coming and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God; and they that hear shall live. Marvel not at this, for the hour is coming in which all that are in their graves shall hear his voice." And does it need an ornate word picture to paint the mental muddle and its gruesome influences that have been generated by the inveterate error of mistaking these graves of our physical bodies for cemetery holes and marble mausoleums?

And countless millions have read these words with only a vague and uncertain wonder as to what sort of a phenomenon was to occur at some incalculable day of a purely mystical spirit-future; or with the fanatically precipitated conviction that this call to all past dead souls would come within their life-time and on some given date. The deluded Millerites of 1837 set the date for April 17, 1843, and thousands disposed of their property to be disencumbered of worldly goods for the apocalyptic denouement. Some modern groups still come forth from time to time with a proclamation of the date when the elements will consume the planet and bring Scriptural "prophecy" to a head. Yet the globe goes serenely swinging in its circles and doubtless will prove recalcitrant to Bible "prophecy" for some millions of years at least.

It is an instructive exercise to attempt to imagine the difference this one Bible passage alone would have made, or can still make, in the life of the world if the true instead of a false and wholly impossible meaning was read into the words "the dead" and the "grave." Instead of being left pondering in perplexity over a promised planetary and racial debacle and holocaust that is unbelievable on any familiar natural basis and psychologically damaging through its incitement to doubt and fear, the reader would be instantly galvanized into dynamic appreciation of their reference to his own life, not in some ill-defined and speculative state of unnatural existence "in the grave" tied somehow to the last few bones and teeth of his earthly cadaver, but in the living present, when, alive as he assumes he is, he begins to realize that his soul is in an actual torpor of veritable "death" to all the more ecstatic possibilities of expanded consciousness which are potential in his divine part, and that he needs to be here and now awakened out of "the body of this death," as St. Paul names it. Then would come to his mind the realizing sense of Paul's cry to us from the Greek wisdom of two thousand years ago: "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give thee light." "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God." "Ye are dead in your trespasses and sins," for "to be carnally minded is death." The Christ himself adds: "You must not let sin have your members for the service of vice; you must dedicate yourselves to God as men who have been brought from death to life."

Back in the Old Testament Isaiah had said in the plainest of words: "We live in darkness like the dead." And Job declares: "I laid me down in death and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustaineth me." If the word "death" is taken here in its ordinary sense of bodily demise, it would say that Job had already once died and been brought back to life. As this is not supposable, then the word bears some other connotation than its common one, and it is that of a soul-death. This is a splendid sample of how in hundreds of passages the substitution of the philosophic sense for the exoteric literal one redeems the text from baffling nonsense to rational meaning.

In the forty-ninth Psalm it is said that "like sheep they are laid in the grave." Does this mean rows of cemetery graves? Not if one remembers that the figure of a lamb led to the slaughter and to his grave was applied to the Christ himself. In the Psalms (49 and 89) and in Hosea (13) the spirit of God says that he will redeem "my soul" and "their souls" from the power of the grave and of death. Can this bear logical reference to anything save the freeing of the divine spirit locked up in man's corporeal constitution from its bondage under such limitations?

What nobler consolation and inspiration would have come from the innumerable recitals of the beautiful twenty-third Psalm if the proper philosophical sense of "the valley of the shadow of death" had been inculcated in all minds! Even down here in the murks and shadows of "death" which the soul must undergo the God presence attends us, and its rod and staff will guide and support us. It will anoint our heads with the oil of gladness, till our cup of blessing runneth over in sheer plentitude of divine love.

Jonah, plunged down to the very "roots of the mountains" in the depths of the "bowels of the earth," cries up to God: "Out of the belly of hell do I cry unto thee, O God!"

It is pertinent to ask here what point that peculiar sentence in the Gospels could have which says that "the Gospel will be preached to them that are dead" if it does not refer to mortals who, here in living bodies, are yet asleep in soul. (I Peter 4; 6.)

But an astonishingly direct and unequivocal allusion to "death" in the Greek sense is found in the first verses of the third chapter of Revelation. Could any statement be more explicit? The Moffatt translation has brought out with striking force the straight meaning of the words, which it seems almost evident the Authorized Version has attempted to cover over: "Ye have the name of being alive, but ye are dead; wake up, rally what is still left to you, though it is on the very point of death." This ringing call, like Paul's cry to the dead to awake, and arise, is shouted at living people on the earth, yet they are declared to be and are named "the dead." Living people are told to awake from death! And no one in two thousand years caught the inescapable inference that the word "dead" applied to the mortals alive in body, but "dead" in soul. And many a Sabbath School teacher, in answer to some child's query as to how a minister can preach to the dead, has blushingly asserted that this is a reference to the way the deceased Jesus spent his three days in the grave "preaching to the spirits in prison." Inexorably the meaning had to be kept within the aura of the graveyard tombstones.

Anticipating a chorus of rejoinders that the words have been taken in a spiritual sense, alluding to a moral death, and not the sheer physical sense of decease of body, so that the critique here is overdrawn, let it be said that this opens no door of escape from the critical strictures of orthodox position here advanced. Of course there has been intelligence enough to read into the words the sense of a moral-spiritual deadness. But this still fails to catch and carry the implications of the Greek philosophical use of the terms and their full theological import, because moral and spiritual deadness was not connected dialectically with the incarnation. It was left simply to earthly dereliction and depravity. It connotes these, of course, for they come with the earth life. But orthodox conception has never demonstrated any dialectical link between these worldly failings and the soul's plunge into water body.

And how are we to interpret Paul's utterance of almost tragic despair (Romans 7:24) other than as an allusion to the soul's stupefaction under its immersion in this fluid body, when in that memorable passage he cries out that he perceives in his members a law which wars against the law of his mind, and ends with the wail of almost moral desperation: "Wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?" And how shall we take his meaning? It is a dubious phrase at best. Does "body" refer to the physical corpus? Or is it a metaphorical figurism for the density and solidity of the soul's "dead" state of consciousness? Any way, how can "death" have a body? Is it a possibility that conniving scribes--as it is confessed they often have done--took a phrase which clearly said "this death (of the soul) in the body," and transposed it over into the meaningless "body of this death"? But if it is an uncorrupted text and correctly translated, it is one of the surest and most open namings of this life as "death" in the Bible. It is therefore a notable and memorable passage.

UNDER THE LAW OF SIN AND DEATH.

But it is reserved for the seventh chapter of Romans (as seen especially in the Moffatt translation) to yield our study the most pointed and amazing corroborations of the interpretative thesis here presented. Paul there (verse five) starts with the assertion that "the sinful cravings excited by the Law were active in our members, and made us fruitful to death. But now we are delivered from the Law, being dead to that wherein we were held, that we should serve in newness of spirit, and not under the old code of the letter." Hundreds of exegetical books have utterly missed the inner purport of this vital statement because they have missed the meaning of that term "the Law" by the proverbial thousand miles. They have taken it to be the old Hebraic Mosaic or Levitical moral and spiritual code-laws regulating the physical observance of an endless list of ethical and ceremonial rites, when all the time it is the "law" of the fleshly members, the law of the lower animal nature inclining unto "sin," the law of the sensual life of the physical body, in contradistinction to the higher law of spiritual goodness. The one binds the soul to the body and hence to "death;" the other frees it to the life of spiritual "liberty of the Sons of God."

But what Paul clearly means is that, as he says in Galatians (4), "while we were yet children (in the evolutionary sense), not knowing God, we were in bondage to them that by nature are no gods,"--meaning the elemental powers dominating the physical body and the world. When at last we grew into the recognition of a higher and diviner law ruling evolution, the law of righteousness, we then "died" unto the influences of the natural law, and we stood out free from its dominance and were reborn in newness of spirit. Just so said the old Greek philosophy.

But the Apostle goes on. Under the natural law we developed "sin," because the tendencies excited by the animal nature, which at first and for a long time is not yet subdued and disciplined by the God-soul, drive us into sensual expression; and for the god in man to behave according to the nature and instincts of the animal in whose body he was for the time a tenant and over whose inclinations he had covenanted to act as king and lord, was to commit "sin." And as "sin" could be overcome and "died unto" only by additional experience of incarnational "death" for the soul thus recreant to its covenanted vows, the Apostle rightly tells us that "by sin came death." Surely this consequence followed the indulgence in animality, since that bound the soul still longer to animal body, imprisonment in which is a living "death."

But then Paul extends the chain of theological dialectic by unfolding its next link. If "by sin came death," then by death "came also the resurrection from the dead." For the pain suffered by the soul in consequence of its "sinful" life of transgression would eventually bring an end to the sinning and a final escape--so much insisted upon in Hindu philosophy--from the round of birth and death in the body.

Then Paul gives expression to perhaps the most positive affirmation that his allusion to "death" is to be taken in its full Greek philosophical sweep and sense, when he makes the extraordinary statements which follow: "I lived at one time without Law myself; but when the command came home to me, sin sprang to life and I died; the command that meant life proved death to me. The command gave an impulse to sin, sin beguiled me and used the command to kill me. So the Law at any rate is holy, the command is holy, just and for our good."

It is doubtful if there is any more pregnant passage in the Scriptures than this for both overt and covert mental illumination of the fundamental principles of Christian theology. It needs comment and analysis.

What does Paul mean by saying that he lived at one time without Law himself? It can not mean that he had lived a life of pure spiritual goodness in the present incarnation, for he elsewhere expressly bemoans his failure and error. So it must refer to his spiritual existence in the upper heavens before his soul's descent to earth. In the upper world his soul had enjoyed the liberty of the Sons of God. Surely in heaven there is no sin, and no law of the members to goad to sin--since there are no "members." The animal below man and the angels above him are both without sin; only man is "born in sin." Paul himself certifies this conclusion when in the very first verse of that same chapter he writes: "Know ye not, brethren (for I speak to them that know the law,) how that the law hath dominion over a man as long as he liveth?" Would we not be warranted in asserting that he meant to say "only as long as a man liveth?" This would be simply to say that he meant us to understand that the law applies to souls in earth, not to spirits in heaven. Every religion in the world has virtually based its message of consolation to mortals enduring the hardships of this life on the assurance that return to heaven at life's end would release the soul from all earthly bondage. The point in Paul's mind is just a reminder of the obvious truth that in incarnation the soul comes under the law that governs earthly bodies, from which it is free in the supernal worlds. That theologians have mistaken this "law" for Jewish religious rigor instead of simply the law of the flesh exercising dominion over the soul when soul has entered its domain, is surely one of the most arrant instances of mental aberration in all the history of religious thought.

But then comes a word which has never received a single true interpretation to give the wonderful philosophy of the passage a chance to be caught by minds starving for truth. It is the "command." The soul in the empyrean is without Law and without sin. But there comes to it a "command." And this "command" is going to break in upon and end its celestial serenity and blessedness, and plunge it into sin. What can so direful a thing as this be? What is this "command"?

Be it noted, then, for the first time in ages, it is the command which comes to all embryonic souls in the cosmic heavens to end their dreamy placidity of supernal consciousness and come down to earth or some other star. It is the command to incarnate!

Failure to catch the crucially significant meaning of this one word has been due to the fact that in the authorized version of the New Testament, whether designedly or through ignorance, the word has been mistranslated "commandment" instead of "command." From the context no one could possibly determine what this "commandment" referred to; there is not a clue given; the apostle has not mentioned any "commandment;" actually none is in sight anywhere in the situation under discussion. The use of the word leaves the passage in blank incomprehension and meaninglessness. It is well known that the exegesis of Paul's theological elucidations in this Epistle to the Romans has perplexed and baffled orthodox scholarship beyond any other portion of the New Testament. It is obviously all due to the failure to grasp the reference of these two words, the "law" and the "command," along with, of course, that lost Greek connotation of the word "death."

And when this command comes home to the soul above and draws it into its downward plunge, as all archaic writings agree, "sin springs to life," and the soul marches on down the Jacob's ladder to enter the cycle of its "death," "burial" and "resurrection" in the earthly body! For the soul in its descent, or involution, abandons its life of spiritual blissfulness in purely subjective states and comes by successive stages closer, closer to the flesh, which, through its sinful cravings excited by the Law of the carnal consciousness, will blot out its memory of diviner motions of the spirit and overwhelm it with the coarser motivations of sense life. The nearer it comes to full submergence in the body the deeper is its coma of "death" to all its higher sensibilities, and the greater its bent to "sin." Its approach to the flesh gives "sin" its chance to "spring to life" in a mode or height of consciousness not hitherto subject to such a spur. The full plunge into the "moist nature" of the body completes the soul's "death" on the cross of matter.

So the divine command, which meant a new chance at life, and life more abundant than ever achievable by the soul before, through the opportunity of a new experience of growth in the mastery of the elements of all worlds,--the command that "meant (more) life" proved "death" unto the soul, as Paul says. Here is new light sufficient to regenerate the decadent life of Christianity. This is the ancient saving truth of life regained after long centuries of hallucinated blindness.

And it is notable that the Apostle ends his dissertation with the final conclusion that all this sin and death of soul in body is NOT the evil thing that ages of wretched miscalculation have pictured it in all the generations of Christian history. Was this descent of soul into earthly body its sinful "fall," its disobedience to God's command? At last the common miscarriage of the allegory in Genesis is refuted by Paul's clear exegesis. Man's descent to earth was NOT in disobedience to God's command, but in full compliance with it. God's command brought the soul to earth. "Man's first disobedience," as Milton puts it, was NOT a wrecking of God's command or of his plan for his human children. Aiming a rejoinder at what were doubtless current misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the allegories in his own day, Paul asks: "Did what was meant for my good prove fatal to me?" And it is as if he concentrates a thousand "No's" and "God forbids'" in his smashing answer to all this theological stupidity. "Never!" shouts the Apostle; and that "Never!" should go echoing about the earth and swirl within the inner precincts of all philosophical and theological brains from now on. For it is the crushing refutation of all the theologies of Adam's sin, involving all humanity in one man's dereliction, the erroneous ideas of man's "fall," and the whole fallacious scheme of the gruesome and morbid theology of "sin."

Never, shouts Saint Paul, was the descent of the soul into body a fall into sin in any sense of a miscarriage of divine beneficence and divine design. It was God's own planting of the seeds of his own life in their proper soil for a new growth into higher levels of eternal life. Paul ends by saying that the springing to life of sin and the resultant "death" proved beneficent "by making use of this good thing." The whole incarnational process, that takes the soul through the valley of the shadow of sin and death, is "this good thing," for which the Apostle says the whole cycle of existence is ordained.

Only in esoteric circles of the present has it been recognized that the Prodigal Son story in the New Testament is a beautiful allegory of the soul's descent into animal body, its long forgetfulness of its diviner home above, its awakening to that memory and its valiant resolve to return thither up the ladder of evolution. It was one of the parables or Logia of the Lord, uttered by the character taking the role of the Christos in the Mystery dramatizations of old. Only in the purview of the meaning elucidated here can the Father's rebuke of the elder brother's churlish reluctance to welcome back the returned wastrel, and his statement of the ground of his rejoicing, be dialectically rationalized. For the Father says: "This my Son was dead, and is alive again." And since he was alive in the human sense the while he was wasting his substance in riotous living and feeding on the husks that the swine did eat, the Father's assertion that he was "dead" can have no other meaning than that he was alive on earth, but with his soul groveling in its "death" under the gross motivations inspired by the fleshly lusts.

In Luke (20:38) it is stated that the Supreme Deity "is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for all men live unto him." Several approaches to the likely meaning are open; but it seems plain that the most obvious one is to take it that the God presence in man, through his Son, or Sons, is not an active and vital power for those in whose nature the immanent principle of Christliness is not yet aroused to function, but that it is an active saving leaven for those who have come alive and awake to its working power, who have become the "living" from the "dead," through having implemented the hidden potency of divine mind.

TO HIM THAT OVERCOMETH.

A strange phraseology is found in Egyptian and other literature that is closely related to this theme of the soul's "death" in body and which touches the fringe of Christian theology, in which, however, it has never received noticeable emphasis. It has to do with what is called "the second death." After noting its occurrence prominently in Egyptian scripts, one was surprised to find it directly in the Christian canon also. In the Book of Revelation one of the seven promises made to "him that overcometh" is that "he shall not suffer the second death." This can not well be apprehended in its true bearing unless the significance of the first "death" is also correctly envisaged. The naive intellect has had to wonder what a second death can mean to a mortal, to whom his own (Christian) Scriptures aver that "it is given unto man once to die." If a man dies as a mortal, how can he die again? As a spirit? But all religion distinctly affirms that it is precisely as a spirit that death can not reach him. A second death in any sense of demise or even of moral decay is not understandable for mankind. The only light of rational diegesis is through the door of the Greek exoteric sense of the soul's "death" as here projected into theology. What, then, can be its meaning?

As Revelation has already declared that, while we have the name of being alive, we are in reality "dead," and follows this with the urgent call to us to "Wake up; rally what is still left to us, though it is on the very point of death," it is clear that, already deep in one "death," we are close to the possibility and threat of still another and deeper one. If a Biblical passage warns people already "dead" that they are on the very point of "death," there must be a first "death" and also a second. As there are two births, there are also two "deaths."

We have the grounds of explication before us in our theme. In the philosophy of the age in which the Scriptures were "written" the soul had entered the realm of "death" when it was brought down from heaven and linked to carnal body. This was its first "death." There it lay in "death" until the turn of the cycle brought its awakening and its eventual resurrection from the "dead" condition.

Now, however, if it sank so deeply into the enmired consciousness of the bodily life and the animal nature as to lose the power to awake and arise out of that lethal stupor, and continued to sink further down to a point where its recall "out of Egypt" was impossible (a conceived eventuality in ancient Christological science), it lost its link of attachment to the upper world and its chance to return thither. In that sad case it would suffer the "second death." And, is it strange, then, that this was the only one of the two that was wholesomely dreaded by the Manes (or shades of the "dead" in the underworld) of the Egyptian books? When this danger had been definitely passed at the turn of the cycle, the soul gives vivid expression to its joy at its presumptive salvation from the worst of its ordeals. "I have not suffered the second death," it jubilates. "I have passed the gates of the Tuat", or underworld. "I have successfully passed the most dangerous crisis," it might have cried in modern terms. But the Christian Scriptures closely match the Egyptian meanings. In Isaiah it is again the divine soul buried in the first "death" that piteously pleads with the Father that "thou wilt not suffer thine holy one to see corruption; thou wilt show me the path of life" back to the upper levels of Paradise regained. How close this is to the soul's similar cry in Egyptian scrolls: "I shall not putrefy, I shall not rot, I shall not become worms; I shall germinate, I shall live again," each phrase thrice repeated to accentuate the ineffable joyousness.

Proclus, the last of the great Neo-Platonists, warns that the soul must avail itself of the evolutionary opportunities provided by its linkage to flesh "without merging itself too deeply in the darkness of body."

In I Samuel (2:6) it is written that "the Eternal kills; the Eternal life bestows; he lowers to death and he lifts up." If comment is not by now superfluous, what sobering reflections should be generated in the minds of intelligent readers by the caught sense of the difference it would have made to all theology if such a passage had been read with the cryptic sense of the Eternal's "killing" us and then "lifting" us up again firmly fixed in all minds, instead of taking it as somehow meaning his actually killing us in the earthly sense. It is not a general item even of theological knowledge that the Eternal is represented as having tried to "kill" every one of the Biblical heroes who, at his command, journeyed down into "Egypt." It is notable in the case of Moses. Even the Jesus of the Gospels had to be assured of his safety in his "flight into Egypt." Paul says the command "killed" him and that he "died." (Yet he was a living man, writing of his own "death!") What peculiar brand of death is it that a living man can describe as his own past experience? Let Christian theology answer; let it face the issue it has, through ignorance or chicanery, dodged for two millennia. For its positive answer is central and vital to the intellectual sanity of the millions of its adherents today, and through these, to the possible salvation of the race.

Says Job: "I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days like the eagle," or phoenix, the fabled bird of death and resurrection. How can death in its physical sense multiply one's days, obviously on earth? Death ends one's days, it does not multiply them. But in its sense of incarnation each additional "death" and burial in (living) body surely does multiply for the soul not only days, but years and ages of ever more thrilling life.

Let us place alongside of Job's rhapsodical utterance one from the Book of the Dead. There the soul, in a ritualistic pronouncement that, when philosophically apprehended in all the length and breadth of its cosmic significance, generates almost a transport of exalted feeling, says, as if in a veritable struggle to suppress bursting rapture: "I die, and I am born again, and I renew myself and I grow young each day." And he enlarges on this by exclaiming in climactic ecstasy: "Eternity and everlastingness is my name." Notable it is that the soul's cry of blissful salvation begins with "I shall die." That its prospective "death" is not foreseen as the cause of gloom or sorrow, but the first step in his journey to ineffable expansion of life, proves that the "death" in contemplation is not the thing of evil hap and the end of existence.

One of the most striking evidences of the presence of the lost sense of the word "death" in the Bible, and apparently a tell-tale evidence of the effort of early scribes to suppress the esoteric intent of much of the Scriptures' original text (mishandling of which has been freely admitted), is to be found in verse nine of the famous fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, called by theologians "the Chapter of the Suffering Servant." There we find the verse running in the ordinary Bible as follows: "And he hath made his grave with the wicked and with the rich in his death." A marginal note is frank enough to tell us something that opens the door to a most engaging surmise, in view of the issue involved. It states that this final word "death" was in the original Hebrew manuscripts in the plural number! It read: ". . . in his deaths." Would it ever occur to ordinary readers what insidious motive might have inspired ancient translators to change this key word from plural to singular? Hardly. Yet it stares one in the face with glaring suggestion of theological duplicity. Surely it is not difficult to envision the natural difficulty a semi-instructed scribe--much more a totally ignorant one--would have in seeing how the word "death" can have any rational meaning whatever in the plural number, seeing that we die but once,--on orthodox doctrinal presuppositions. It could be that some such copyist or theologian, meeting the plural form of the word and finding it hard to reconcile with sensible meaning, ended by figuring it was a mistake, and summarily "corrected" it by substituting the singular form. This is at least a charitable view of the possibilities to account for the change.

But another is possible. Astuter theological discernment, seeing with dismay (after the third century) that the plural number of the word "death" would naturally betray its esoteric and only rational meaning of multiple incarnations, deemed it a holy subterfuge to remove all possibility of this calamity by making it singular.

For in Christian theology physical death can have no plural. It must be some other "death" that can be pluralized. And this was doubtless known to the few remaining esotericists in the Christian movement after the debacle of ignorance in the third century, who saw that the verse would give away the then discarded doctrine of reincarnation. Church polity had already decreed the ousting of this too Pagan conception from formulated dogmas. The tell-tale verse had to be made innocuous. "Death" had to be kept singular.

But all too clearly the lucid import of the plural form shines out. "Deaths" could mean only repeated incarnations! In one life the soul made its "grave" (of body) with or among or in low and wicked people; in another it was cast with the rich and the high of the earth. Hindu philosophy gives expression to this very conception. In Sir Edwin Arnold's The Light of Asia it is intimated that the entity that comes in one life as a beggar "will come again a king." Here in Christian Scriptures, pronounced to be true in every word and syllable, was the too obvious reference to incarnation as reincarnation. It dared not be permitted to stand. It had to be concealed. The change to the singular did it.

Then there is that perplexing statement in the Scriptures that "the last enemy to be overcome is death." This, taken of course in its assumed meaning of bodily decease, has led uncritical and credulous minds to the weird expectation of an immortality for the human being in the flesh. But this is not in the order or plan of nature. The physical is to have no organic immortality. Flesh and blood can not inherit the kingdom of heaven.

What, then, it is challenged, is the meaning? Simply that there will be an end to the series of "deaths," meaning incarnations, when the long course of experience in fleshly embodiments on earth is finished and the soul becomes a pillar in the mansions of divinity "to go no more out" into mundane life in this cycle of cosmic evolution. This is surely the overcoming of the last "enemy" of the soul's advance. "Death" will be swallowed up in the soul's crowning and consummative victory in the last incarnation of the series.

The soul's residence in the "darkness" of body being symbolized as its "night-time," and the body's watery composition earning it the allegorical designation as the "sea," luminous clarification of vivid meaning flashes into the mind when one contemplates the Revelation assertion that at the day of evolutionary consummation, when the soul has won the victory over the lower elements and returned to spiritual heavens, "there shall be no more night and no more sea."

It is instructive to compare two passages, one from Egyptian literature and the other from the third chapter of Revelation. In both what is to be noticed is a sequence of three states, namely life, to begin with, then death, and after that life again. This is most revealing, as showing the eternal swing of the pendulum between life and "death." First the Egyptian verse. Says the soul in the script of the Ritual: "He hath given me the beautiful Amenta (the underworld--this earth) through which the living pass from death to life." And in Revelation the Logos proclaims: "I am he that liveth and was dead; and behold I am alive for evermore." Life, "death" and life again forever alternate in the cycles of the soul's eternal journeying.

Empedocles speaks of the cycles of generation. They he says, cause "the living to pass into the dead."

And so it comes to that climactic utterance of the divine soul of man, perhaps the most exultant outburst of holy rapture expressed in the Scriptures. It is from Paul's immortal chapter on the Resurrection, the fifteenth of First Corinthians. As the essay concludes with its unforgettable rhapsody, the reader should take it deep into his own inner consciousness as being the glad cry that will go ringing out from his and our own lips as, finally triumphant over our last "enemies" of sense and body, we shall go winging our way verily on pinions of ecstasy back to the celestial home.

"So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written: Death is swallowed up of victory.

O grave, where is thy victory?

O death, where is thy sting?